The subject matter disclosed herein relates generally to tracking and analysis of electrical-physiological interference, and more particularly to automated tracking and analysis of electrical-physiologic interference occurring during a medical procedure and/or occurring in a hospital or other managed care institution.
Electrical interference, or noises, may pose significant problems with the use of sensitive medical instruments and/or imaging devices. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has made recommendations to capture and log noise events to help determine the characteristics of the interferences. Conventional logging techniques may rely on operator judgment and diligence in recording interference, however, and are frequently unreliable and/or incomplete. Conventional logging techniques are labor intensive and error prone. There may be a number of sources of interference for any given application, ranging from incorrect application or use of a medical device, to environmental factors within or nearby a hospital infrastructure, to unintended influences from external power sources or consumers. Maintaining the necessary discipline to log events is difficult and time consuming. Further, logged data is often anecdotal, or forms part of a patient record making extraction difficult while maintaining necessary privacy concerns.
Use of external services, for example to identify sources or causes of interference, suffers from drawbacks as well. For example, conditions used to test a facility may not be an accurate replication of actual conditions, for example with respect to all of the equipment used. The equipment and patient may be understood as forming a complex web or array of receiver/transmitter elements, which may be difficult to duplicate. Staff misuse of equipment may make an acceptable situation appear worse than reality, and a false positive may result. Also false positives may drive up expense and/or result in temporary loss of utility of facilities.